In the early and mid-1980s, many industry and government leaders found that a renewed emphasis on quality was a necessity for doing business in an ever-expanding, and more demanding, competitive world market. Many businesses either did not believe quality mattered or did not know where to begin. For more than a decade, process management has been a main part of modern management systems. Total quality management models like the model of the Malcolm Baldridge National Quality Award or the model of the European Foundation for Quality Management established in 1988 provide one of seven categories (MBNQA) or nine criteria (EFQM) weighted in the range of 10-14% for the evaluation of quality and performance of processes.
Process management, according to the 1997 criteria, is examined by key aspects including customer-focused design, product and service delivery processes, support processes, and supplier and partnering processes involving all work units. A category examines how key processes are designed, effectively managed, and improved to achieve better performance.
As an example, one way to measure a business is through the production or delivery processes. For instance, a precision manufacturing company measured its on-time delivery service. They stated “On-time delivery indicates a positive trend over time” rising from 87 percent in 1990 to 99.94 percent in 1995.
Process management can also be measured by the management of support services. For instance, a consumer support services company is in the process of restructuring and reducing the workforce size. To help manage this, its parent corporation has developed a transition center to answer any questions or concerns of employees. They are also helping new associates by initiating services until they can find new employment within or outside the company.
Nowadays, large enterprises or companies are increasingly changing from a function-oriented to a process-oriented management approach. Thus, enterprise- or company-wide comparability of the quality of single processes becomes a predominant issue in managing business processes within such an enterprise. But continuous improvement of such quality management systems, on such a large scale, is rendered difficult as processes of different technical or administrative areas have to be evaluated and made comparable to each other.
Another important factor for successful process management is to ascertain that essential characteristics of a process are taken into account, such as identification of suppliers and customers of a sales process or determination and specification of the corresponding process parameters, training of the process users and continuous improvement of the process via gathering and analyzing the parameters or benchmarking over time in a predefined order.
It is further known to evaluate process performance of business or development processes of large enterprises or companies by using a so-called process maturity or “Process Vitality Index” (PVI). The PVI allows assessment of the maturity of processes defined and managed according to the ten-step method described e.g. in “Anleitung fuer die Durchfuehrung der Prozessarbeit”, IBM Deutschland GmbH, Nov. 10, 1995. The PVI has to be established manually.
Further, “1998 Self Assessment Guidelines for Companies”, EFQM Brussels Representative Office, EFQM Issue 6, September 1996 and the “Malcolm Baldridge National Quality Award 1997—Criteria for Performance Excellence”, issued by the U.S. Department of Commerce, proposed to build assessment teams which aggregate and consolidate the individual assessments in consensus sessions.
Another approach is to use printed or computer-assisted questionnaires to obtain a picture of the personality of a company's customers.
Although the known approaches have already implicitly implemented decision trees for the provision of assessment criteria—an example of a corresponding scoring matrix of the Malcolm Baldridge National Quality Award (MBNQA) and a derived decision tree is depicted in FIG. 1—they are disadvantageous insofar as they are based only on written criteria and related scorings to be read and applied by individuals. To avoid subjective assessment results and disregard of dependencies and exclusions in the criteria, the individual assessors have to participate in comprehensive training for calibrating their individual results. Furthermore, assessment teams have to be built in order to aggregate and consolidate the individual assessments in consensus sessions.